"It'll be over soon."
I stalk into the smoke-filled room. The mouth to the shield is blackened like a Goth's lips and I laugh. Here at the heart I feel the power of it more than ever. It pushes back at the black eye, keeping it contained.
I crawl in through the hot, scorched hatch. I toss mines and grenades indiscriminately. I riddle it with explosives, then I exit, pick up a handful of remote detonators, and walk a length down the corridor. It triggers on the first, initiating another chain reaction that starts with a muffled-
PFFFT
And crescendos through all the bombs I planted.
PFPFFCRKKKBOOMPFFFCRKKK
The bunker itself shakes. The corridor sways. The shield comes down.
The young man looks at me from the thickness of dust. Black, blue, black, blue. In another life this would be freedom for him now. The line is completely gone around Istanbul, and at least for a time he can go above ground and see the sun. Does he even remember what the world is really like? What it smells like?
But he won't be free. I'm here, and that's the threat. The leprous thing has shown me the way, and I have the eye. The shield isn't there to control it anymore, and the eye's great weight presses down like water behind the Hoover Dam, waiting to surge.
I let it surge.
Black light pours out as I funnel the eye to everyone near; a signal that overwhelms their minds like lightning through a circuit. The ones nearest to me die in seconds. The boy overheats and passes away. I guide the surge outward, growing stronger with each death. There are so many levels to this place and so many people on the runways above. I pour the black light into their minds.
POP POP POP
They die like soap bubbles.
Down through the decks, up through the earth, and it's not even me anymore; I'm just a lens. This was coming anyway. I squeeze and their minds blow. POP POP POP. Dozens, hundreds, and every drop of blood shed by the lash shall be repaid with the-
Something hits my head and I fly. My head hits the wall and my shoulder follows, then I crumple with black light spraying wildly out of my mouth and eyes. I blink and roll and take another hit, this time in my right arm, thrown up instinctively as protection.
It breaks at the wrist. Black light pours out along with blood. The pain comes.
Above me stands a figure in a blood-crusted black helmet, and for a moment I think that Shark-eyes has come back again, or Arnst, but then I see the face through the dark visor and realize the truth.
It's Anna.
I gawp up at her. I don't know whether to rejoice or scream. She just broke my arm with a rifle butt. She's alive. I try to frame some words that will fit the moment, but my head isn't working and there's so much light rushing through me that I can't say a thing.
The rifle comes down again, this time cracking into my shoulder, and I buckle under it. Perhaps my clavicle breaks, and I scream. They've got to her. They've polluted her, and now she works for them.
"Anna, stop," I gasp, fumbling with my left arm up. "Stop."
"You stop!" she shouts back, and brings the butt down again, this time cracking off my shin as I kick my legs up in a protective huddle. "You stop doing this!" Another blow cracks sharply off my knee.
I gasp and roll, on to my belly so I can crawl. The black light's abandoning me now, spraying out in haphazard spurts from my eyes and my broken wrist. I crawl on my good arm with my cracked collarbone sagging, my shattered knee-cap letting me down, and she hits me in the back, beating the light out of me. She beats the ribs in my back and several break at once, pushing in like daggers to meet the ones broken through from the front.
I scream and crawl. "Stop," I moan, rolling pathetically onto my back. "Anna." I wave my feeble arms above me, right hand wagging sickly like a dog's tail. She raises the rifle but doesn't bring it down.
I'm panting and bleeding. How many broken bones? I reach up through the light but I can't feel her, cocooned in her helmet. What looked so tight on Arnst's head is a perfect fit for her, though her hair is crammed in there. I laugh through the pain. If Lara wore a helmet, perhaps she would look like this. I think of the gorgeous feel of her hair, the touch of her skin, and how happy it made me.
I don't want that to end. I can't let that end.
"I could've shot you, Amo," Anna barks, reversing the rifle so the barrel points at my head. "You have to stop. I will kill you if you don't."
I wave my arms in little demented motions to show I understand. My thoughts are still firing wrong. The black eye is up there still, but the connection through my addled head is faulty.
"How can I stop?" I ask through a mouth hot with blood. "They bombed New LA, Anna. They tried to kill us all. We did it together in Maine. How can I stop now?"
"There's a cure," she shouts, over the cries of people round us in the bunker as they come back to themselves. I didn't finish them all yet, there are still plenty left to come for me. "It's real and I'm going to teach it to them."
I look up at her, and I think in that moment that she is beautiful. She is truly Cerulean's daughter, and the real hero of this tale. A cure has always been the greatest myth. Bring the zombies back to life. Bring my family back. Bring back all the things that we've lost.
But Cerulean died for his dream, and it's too much death already.
"There is no cure," I gasp, and blood rolls from my open mouth. I am so pathetic now. "Shark-eyes said so. No cure for them, or for us. I have to do this, Anna."
She tightens her sight down the rifle. My blood drips down its length. Every drop shall be repaid. "You're wrong. I have the cure inside me." She looks into my eyes. "I'm pregnant, Amo. Ravi's dead, he died saving me, but I'm carrying his child. There's something in its DNA that can save us, but I need Lucas to do it, and Lucas is here. He's in this bunker, and you're killing him."
I reel. I roll. I try to shuffle backwards, like a crab with half its limbs chopped off, but Anna prods me hard in the sternum with the barrel and I stop. She is truly brave, and righteous, and I am the villain.
"It's another lie, Anna," I tell her, disdaining the whining tone in my voice. So let it be. "They've lied and they've lied, they signed our treaties and made their promises, and then they dropped a goddamned nuclear bomb! We keep trusting, Anna, and trusting because we're weak, and when will it end?" I spit blood to the side. "Shark-eyes understood, do you think he'd have pity on us, if he could? There's no room for pity any more. No room for hope built on lies, because where is the cure, Anna? Where is it?!"
People are rising to their feet nearby, shuffling down the corridor like zombies, all ready to die, and they are the heroes here too, not me.
"It's in me," Anna says, and touches her belly. "It's here. I can't let you do this. I need Lucas, Amo. I need him."
I sag. I understand. I let my arms fall to the side, let the defeat show in my eyes, so she sees it. She knows the old me, and knows what this is.
She lets the rifle barrel drift down to her side.
It's all I need.
I open the battered floodgates and channel the full force of the eye at her. It throws her backward, head full of chaos as the helmet interacts with her immunity, and the rifle fires into the metal floor with a bright PLINK PLINK that sends bullets ricocheting madly around, but it's not enough.
I push up and press on as the torrent drives her back. Bodies drop and burn out around me again, caught in the spreading halo. Anna drops to her knees as I rise; on one shaky knee, with one broken arm and shoulder, but I get up. I'm like Julio, I think, I'll be the deformed villain in his torture pit at the end, though there's one essential difference between Julio and me.
I'm going to win.
I stand and Anna falls, and the black eye buoys me up. It gives me strength, letting me ignore the pain. I stand over her and look down, feeling some of the joy I've learnt to take in victory. If Drake were here I know what he'd say; the lesson I've finally learned.
This is how to win.
You can't absorb tha
t much pain and stay a good man. You have to learn to turn it outward and direct it at others. You have to learn to love it, and it's with love that I press forward, beating black light against Anna's head through the helmet until she starts shaking out of control. It's for my family and my people that I keep pushing, until she vomits in the helmet and her eyes flash black, until she's gone so far that the only step further is to squeeze a final time and wink her out. I press, and I press, and I know I'm going to do it, to save us all until with a soft touch and warm word there is Cerulean at my side.
"Amo," he says.
He stands in the Darkness as a thing apart. Around us the world crumbles and bodies burst, but he stands proud. My friend. My great friend.
"Amo," he only says, and there it is, the name they gave that I bore through my brother's death and the apocalypse and all of it. Love, on one side. War, on the other. Which one am I?
"Amo," he only says, and the black eye coughs out of me. I have to, I tell him. Cerulean, please, you have to understand. You have to see.
"Amo," is all he says, and it's all there. He's saved me so much, and I can't stop myself from wondering, is he saving me now? A sob breaks through my breathing, because I can't kill his daughter with him here. I can't not do it, but here he is. His eyes swim with understanding, cerulean blue amidst all the black, and I remember running the Darkness together.
"We're still there," he says. "You and me. We always will be."
I turn from him and scream, as the force of the black eye rips me apart. This is what I've made myself to be, a cruel man because they have to die, and I didn't go through so much only to step back now. Feargal is dead. Keeshom is dead. So many thousands are dead, and-
I see Anna's face through the visor, and she's still the little girl who ran to me on the Chinese Theater forecourt so long ago, eyes alight with hope. I see all the years of anguish she went through, and put us through, and Lara's fears that she would drown on the Atlantic, and I see the good woman she has become, and then it's only me and the black light and Anna standing in the corridor, and suddenly I know.
She is my child.
Just as much as Vie and Talia, just like Drake's fifty lost child soldiers, like Masako's boy Lin and every child born to Witzgenstein's people, like the boy on the floor here and the red-haired girl in Brezno, they are all my people.
It means I'm fighting for the wrong things. I'm fighting for half of what they are, and I should have learned this lesson long ago; in Times Square, In Iowa, in Las Vegas, but all I managed to glimpse were the edges of what being a survivor means, that Anna's trying to tell me now.
That we're all in this together.
Little Anna lies beneath me, and I love her. She's holding up a red string even now, with that sad, haunted look in her eye, and I can't kill her like this, not when she's pregnant, not with Ravi dead, not after so much loss.
I look around and see what I've done. How many I've killed already. My vanity, my blindness, my rage. For this I deserve to die. For this I deserve…
I let it go.
I let the black eye go, and like that it is gone, dissipated into the air. The black light fades and I focus on Anna, unconscious, suffocating in her helmet, and I know what comes next.
I prize Arnst's helmet off her head and leave her gasping. I toss it on the floor as others start to wake around us. These ones can live, then. Let them do so without me. I need to find a fitting place. Like Sophia, I need to find the right spot to hang my body by the neck until I die.
I look round at them; all the people I tried to kill, and I don't say I'm sorry, because I'm not. I've only failed again, and that makes me the worst coward of all. There is nothing to say for a moment like this.
21. ON YOUR KNEES
Anna roused with Lucas leaning over her, pumping her chest. Her ribcage flexed and lights flared across her eyes.
"I'm here," she whispered, and he stopped pumping and began to weep. "I'm all right."
"Oh God, Anna! Thank God!"
She held his head close while he wept. She stroked his hair, while random people milled around them, still dizzy from whatever Amo did on the line. "It's all right," she said. Her throat hurt, and the air tasted bad, like an explosion. To the side there were bodies lying that did not move.
Not everyone was all right.
Lucas pulled himself up and rubbed his eyes. "Where's Ravi? Did he make it? Peters and Jake are here."
That started her crying. That they were alive. That Ravi wasn't.
"Ravi's dead," she said, and he cried more at that. He pulled her vomit-sticky head up and held it close to his chest. "But there's something else."
He sniffed and laughed. "What else?"
"I'm pregnant."
It felt strange to say the words, because it wasn't even a living baby. It was just a thing, an experiment maybe, but still, it was Ravi's, and it was right to cry for Ravi, just as it was right to be happy some part of him remained with her.
His eyes searched hers. "You are?"
"It's Ravi's, from after he died. It's complicated. But it's hope, Lucas. I know about the Lyell's. I know about the false cure, the trap, all of it. This baby," she touched her stomach, "there's something special about it. It gives us a chance."
His eyes narrowed. "You know about the Lyell's?"
She nodded. Through her tears she laughed, because you couldn't only be broken and afraid. Being broken and afraid didn't give you strength, or not the right kind of strength. Feeding off that would make you like Amo, and she wasn't going to make that mistake again. She'd done it once when she had nothing else to live for but Ravi, when she would have killed any of her own people who got in her way, but now she was a different woman.
She was going to be a mother.
She held Lucas' head and smoothed the tears from his cheeks. "It's going to be OK," she said, and kissed his forehead. That only made him cry more. "We'll figure it out."
"Maybe it can cure Jake," he whispered, and that caught her attention.
"What happened to Jake?"
Lucas pulled away. The misery sank into his eyes deeper, pushed there by the hope in her voice. "He's got advanced stage Lyell's. But maybe, if you're right…"
He tailed off. Anna didn't need to ask. She nodded, then she pushed herself to her feet, pulling him up after her. People milled around them. Someone was crying. Many bodies remained down, coated with a thin layer of soot. Amo was gone, that was clear.
"Who's in charge here?" she asked.
Lucas laughed. He touched her stomach gently.
"I think it's you."
* * *
Eight thousand miles to the west, Lara woke from another nightmare.
The RV was moving; always moving, though slower every day. There was no reserve fuel left, and the turgid stuff they siphoned en route was slowly gumming and corroding the engine. When it failed, there would be no hope of fixing it. Perhaps they would find another. Perhaps they would continue on foot.
The rolling siege with Witzgenstein was going badly.
Seven more reserves they'd been to, and all of them had been burnt out, with fewer and fewer resources left for them each time. Some fuel, some scraps of food. It wasn't enough. They tried to supplement; once they went off hunting for a secondary cairn, but it was burnt out too.
There was no decent food left in the world but ancient snack bars and protein powders salvaged from Yangtze centers. Occasionally they found random outcroppings of roadside fruit, and managed to shoot the odd wild animal from the road, but it wasn't enough to feed nearly eighty people. There was no fuel but the thick stuff they pumped up from beneath gas stations, and that was slowly killing their engines. Already they'd abandoned half their vehicles behind.
It left them no choice but to keep going east. The range on their convoy was so tightly limited. Perhaps they could make it to New York and start from scratch, at least that was the dream Lara kept repeating, but Witzgenstein had them now and would surely not allow it.
Some of the children were gone. Many of the adults. Taken, or deserted. What difference did it make? Lara couldn't be awake all the time. She didn't have the strength. Every time she woke she saw Witzgenstein, grinning in the dark of Drake's RV. Promising her ashes and suffering. The children didn't even cry out when they were taken. Every time they abandoned an RV, more people remained behind. They got down on their knees on the road and waited for their savior to come. Seeing them like that in the rearview mirror had made Lara sick, but there was nothing she could do. She couldn't feed them, so what else were they supposed to do?
She rubbed a hand over her temple. Dirty, sticky with old sweat. Out the windshield it was before dawn on some road in Kentucky. Crow sat at the wheel and drove, bleary-eyed himself. They hadn't heard anything from Amo since he'd left. They were alone here, and the dream of New LA had more than fallen apart. It had been shredded and looted, with only the dregs left behind.
Perhaps twenty-one children remained, and those hungry and growing thin. None of them understood what was happening, but few had the energy left to cry. A few adults had vied with Lara for control, as their conditions grew worse, but now nobody had the drive.
"Surrender," Greg had told her, before she pulled away from him and his little group somewhere in New Mexico. He'd been one of the first. "She'll have mercy."
Lara had known otherwise. She'd kept hoping. But hope had been a vain mirage.
Now the nightmare came back to her, drifting across the darkness over the wild forests outside. It was a new vision now, no longer a great white eye over a burning New LA, but a black one that hung in the air over a broken man on a barren plateau. She knew without seeing his face that this was Amo, though he trudged with a limp and his shoulder hung slack from an amateurish sling. He was alone. He had failed too. He trudged north.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 166